Tivon Rice turns AI-written architecture into cast concrete

A concrete megaphone is an unusual destination for an AI-generated sentence. In Tivon Rice’s Pattern Language 2-253, a textual pattern called Talking Machines prompted him to fabricate megaphones that amplify the installation’s spoken narratives. The 2024 work appears in the catalogue for London’s current Oracle Machines exhibition.[1][2]

Its architectural starting point is A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander and colleagues’ 1977 book. Each pattern connects a design problem with discussion and a proposed solution. The book’s own account presents this vocabulary as something people can use to shape their houses, streets and communities.[3]

Rice arranged spaces and descriptive voices into a matrix, combining an internet-trained language system with the book’s content to generate 253 speculative micronarratives. One, Voronoi Cubes, suggested interlocking polygons. Rice translated that idea into parametric designs and 3D-printed moulds for casting concrete sculptures.[1]

The generated text therefore becomes a brief with another maker still to act on it. A paragraph cannot specify every decision about a mould, a material or a sound. Rice’s account makes that intervening interpretation visible: the words return to the studio, where they acquire weight and volume.[1]

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